Like as of the latest book to be translated to english Akari and Menou's relationship has basically been (spoilers)
Akari: *actively declares undying love and attraction towards Menou, constantly*
Menou: 
Akari: *actively conspires to die in the hopes of saving Menou’s life, while burning her literal soul as fuel to keep a three month timeloop going for an unknown number of years in the hopes of finding an iteration where Menou lives* (corny as that sounds, the gradual reveal that that’s what was happening was great)
Menou:
Akari and Menou: *merge their literal souls together, becoming one singular being split between two bodies, in language that’s explicitly romantic and euphemistic*
Menou: “I made a friend.”
Akari: *gets mind-wiped by the original Menou, Hakua, who is both the literal god of the world’s main religion and so madly infatuated with Akari that she betrayed and murdered every other friend she ever had, waited a thousand years, and plotted to kill an entire world just in the hopes of being reunited with Akari*
Menou: “I must kill god, alter the basic mechanical rules of this world, and save my friend. Then I will spend my life with her and hold her hand, as is normal for friends.”
I want to scream. 
Still a shame the anime never got picked up for another season.
the density of menou could generate the gravitational pull of an average gas giant
New headcanon: Menou is ace and also got no sort of sex ed whatsoever and so literally thinks holding hands is as intimate as it gets, a misunderstanding further compounded by her soul merge thing literally involving holding hands.
Sadly this is par for the course with yuri, see also Witch From Mercury where they got married offscreen in a manner that’s “up for interpretation”.
At least there’s I’m in Love with the Villainess which is explicitly, textually gay and in the LN has a lot of somber reflection on real-world LGBT issues.
But even that has Rae portrayed as, to be generous, borderline predatory.
Oh no Rae’s just an absolutely awful person in a lot of ways. I think at least some of that is her not entirely seeing the world she’s in as real and so feeling entitled to use her obsessive meta knowledge and bullshit protagonist powers to do personal wish-fulfillment stuff, though at least some of that involves helping people in ways she couldn’t in her former life. But it is very much more just a story doing “normal isekai wish fulfilment with problematic implications, but this time it’s queer wish fulfillment instead of straight.” I will say that the LN does have Rae reflecting on how she’s basically playing a homophobic caricature as a defense mechanism of sorts, but I can’t remember if there’s a point where she acknowledges that her whole plot to get Claire is gross and bad even if she’s also trying to save her life along the way.
I think I’ve said this before, but her overall character arc should have been to grow and stop trying to impose her own desires on Claire while finding someone who actually reciprocated them, instead of just winning the explicitly-straight Claire as a prize for doing enough good deeds who was then perfectly happy to be her wife and spontaneously started reciprocating her feelings.
I can no longer abide anime that pull shit like this, I simply will not stand for it. We deserve better and it’s out there.
Still a shame the anime never got picked up for another season.
Aww, poop.
There ought to be a law that if you start an adaptation you have to finish it.
Can’t now because woke.
Could it be a bit. That sounds unintentionally funny.
I’m framing it in a funnier way than it actually shows up. The literal text is a lot of very dancing-around-being-romantic stuff and whenever it puts a label on Akari and Menou/Hakua’s relationships it’s “dear friend” or “best friend.” I don’t even know if that’s an issue in the original text or a translator thing, but I’m not exactly hopeful that it’s just a bad translation.
